[Part home-made science (before it became doctrine and law), part animated video reverie, Reinke's brief and episodic compression is an incendiary release which opens by announcing the death of the reader, of any audience capable of pulling its fragments together, or better, of dissolving into its tissues, of allowing the body to change shape, to identify, for instance, with an insect. Or a stone. It begins with the death of the reader and ends with the death of the author, and between he stops along the way to muse on rain falling up, the "useless bio-diversity" of insects (meaning life is mostly decoration), signal deconstruction and beautiful noise, and burning books. His style is abrupt and associative; he jumps and jumps again, producing these small beautiful abysses which no one can see. He has produced something invisible to treasure, an impossible movie, which refuses to adhere to memory's sound-byte continuums. It is waiting for a new body to store or restore it. And while it is waiting it speaks, like a lover on the phone. —Mike Hoolboom]

 

 

Ask the Insects

Friends, avoid

the darkened chamber

where your light

is being pinched.

 

 

 

In the year of our birth, it was announced that the author was dead, and the death of the author was the birth of the reader. And so it was. But the reader has proved inadequate: simple-minded, easily distracted, and mean, and petty. They are not equal to whatever we have put in front of them. We must take what we have made away from them. We must hold it in trust and prepare for the emergence of a capable audience. It will not come from Europe, or from some distant luminous celestial body. And it won't come from genetic engineering, or some kind of experimental community. It will not come at all. And if it does, we will have no way of recognizing it.

This animation is not an animation but live-action footage digitally manipulated. It began as a film sequence of something alive and moving in the world, was transferred to analogue video, then digital video, then captured to my computer. I took the file into a motion graphics application and applied a filter. That's all. Then back out to tape. Even if we cannot reverse the process and ever get back to our original image, we can rest assured that the process did occur, and the result is here before us, twitching and pulsing. An image which is not at all abstract, but merely abstracted. The world decoded. Beautiful noise. Beautiful noise signifying nothing, and yet so much more meaningful than the original scrap of celluloid.

 

 

Would we love ourselves better if we were different? Let's ask the insects, for they are different. They come in a staggering array of forms. Amazingly, the number of functions a creature must perform to sustain life is very limited, but the array of forms they take is vast. The world is, therefore, mostly decoration. It isn't even trying for purity anymore, but the endless chatter of biodiversity. There are too many species in the world, but that doesn't mean we can't learn something from their strange irrelevance.

 

It is an old custom to burn bad books, and I have nothing against it. Bad books do us no harm — it's fine to have them in the world, I guess — but they do us no good either. Recycle — sure, if you like. But everyone loves a bonfire, and books burn hot and release their ash, full of words released finally from their inadequate sentences.

 

Every day a bit further, until the horizon is breached.

 

 

Whenever the rain falls, it knows it will rise again, and not full of dissolved impurities, but distilled to its essence, particles loose and moist, rising inexorably heavenward to join the endlessly protean cloud-cover, like a graveyard where all the stones have your name on them.

 

 

 

Here we come now to the end of the road, the top of the hill, so its time now for some introductions: Schoolyard, graveyard. Schoolyard, graveyard. School. Grave.